Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Two days later, several million marchers flooded the streets of Paris to denounce terrorism and defend free speech. The feel-good demonstration, which featured an array of world leaders and France’s entire political class, with the conspicuous exception of Marine Le Pen, was billed as a defiant display of unity. Le Pen, who was excluded from the march by President François Hollande—a politically motivated move that likely won her many new voters—held her own demonstration in the small southern town of Beaucaire, near Marseille. One thousand supporters turned out to hear her speak. “After tomorrow, the debate about what was done and what wasn’t done must begin,” she declared. “Have we put to work all the means at our disposal to fight the scourge of Islamist terrorism?”2 A week later, she took to the pages of the New York Times to call for immigration restrictions, stripping jihadists of French citizenship and reinstituting border checks.3

  The wave of asylum-seekers that streamed into Europe six months later was, for Le Pen, the greatest political gift imaginable.

  In the middle of the afternoon on August 25, 2015, as most of Germany was enjoying the end of the summer holidays, a small government agency posted a message on Twitter that would shape the fate of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and many millions of Germans. “We are at present largely no longer enforcing Dublin procedures for Syrian citizens,” read the seemingly unspectacular bureaucratic tweet, posted by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. But it meant something very different for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants streaming through Turkey and seeking a way into Europe.4

  A few days after the German announcement, a steady flow of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, and others began to arrive on the Greek island of Kos. As tanned Dutch tourists dodged refugee children wandering through the bike lanes, a middle-aged Syrian man showed me a screenshot of his itinerary on a tattered Samsung smartphone. A squiggly line snaked through a poorly drawn map of Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary, with the prices of each point-to-point journey listed in dollars. The shortest and most treacherous, from Turkey to Kos, cost £1,200 (the hydrofoil fare for those blessed with visas and the right passports was £12). If they made it across alive, the weary refugees—many of them from Syria—would then trudge two miles past backpacker bars and package-deal hotels, passing occasional British revelers on the way home from a long night of drinking. They arrived at the still-shuttered Kos police station before dawn. And then they’d wait.

  It was there that I met Mohammed, a sixteen-year-old from the Syrian city of Latakia, who after the German announcement had made the journey from Turkey on a small dinghy with twenty-one others. He had been living in a tent on Kos’s trash-strewn beach for a week. His companions, twenty-year-old Hatem and twenty-two-year-old Mahmoud came from the Syrian cities of Deir ez-Zor and Hama, where some of the earliest protests against the Assad regime began in 2011. One bears a scar where he was shot through the knee. The other fled to Jordan, where he was beaten by police, before escaping to Turkey. Greek Coast Guard boats rescued their vessel halfway to Kos and brought them ashore.

  The next day, the three men took an overnight ferry to Athens with hundreds of other Syrians. As word spread that Germany was opening its doors, odes to German chancellor Angela Merkel appeared on Facebook in Arabic, praising her as a “loving mother” and a lion.5 By the end of the week, Mohammed had written to say that he’d reached the Austrian-German border. “I don’t know anyone in Hamburg,” he told me in a text message. But Germany had announced it would accept five hundred thousand refugees, so he crossed and took a train north.6 Within days, the crowds stuck at Budapest’s railway station began to do the same.

  Germany’s decision to welcome so many migrants is deeply rooted in its own past. What is today known as the Dublin Rule, requiring asylum-seekers to request protection in the first EU country they enter, was originally a German idea. The German constitution was amended in 1993 to forbid asylum applications from anyone who had passed through a safe third country on their way from danger in their homeland to Germany. If Germany were surrounded by safe states, which it was, then theoretically it would be very difficult for a mass influx to occur; only arrivals by air would be eligible for asylum. “In the ’90s, we had four hundred thousand asylum-seekers, and this dropped until we had like thirty thousand,” says Robin Alexander, a political reporter with the newspaper Die Welt. Many of the Balkan refugees eventually went home. “Wherever you go in the Balkans, people speak German today,” he says.

  And so the Dublin Rule was born. Nevertheless, “It always left a lot of German politicians with a bad conscience,” says Alexander. It was a legal requirement that clashed with the spirit of much of the rest of the German constitution.

  Contrary to popular belief, Merkel was not necessarily driven by compassion for refugees when she threw open the gates. At her core, says Alexander, who knows Merkel better than most journalists, she really believes “that if Europe allows itself to be broken up into smaller entities,” the European project could fall apart. And if the European Union were under threat, how could it compete with China or stand up to Russia in Ukraine?7

  Henryk Broder was having none of it. Broder, the son of two Holocaust survivors—his mother survived deportation to Auschwitz; his father, Buchenwald—is one of Europe’s most gifted polemicists. His trenchant attacks on political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s skewered Germans for their latent anti-Semitism and failure to reckon with their crimes. In 1981, he wrote a scathing essay before emigrating to Israel for a few years. “Auschwitz at your backs, but neither in your heads nor hearts, today you can afford to debate about whether refugees fleeing Vietnam are ‘real’ or simply ‘economic refugees,’” he wrote caustically. “You count the dollar notes and gold bars these people bring along—those fortunate enough to survive their ‘flight.’ … These debates took place here once before, when what was at stake was whether to let the wealthy Jews emigrate ‘for a fee’ or whether to kill them right off the bat.”8

  Back then, Broder went after his comfortable lefty intellectual friends for being indifferent toward refugees and thinking they did not bear any trace of their parents’ Jew hatred. These days, he is less sympathetic to those fleeing war. Broder now edits the right-wing website Ach Gut! (a play on “Axis of Good”) and has joined those denouncing the new refugees streaming into Germany. And because they are Muslims, he has few qualms criticizing them. He told a Danish television interviewer that Merkel was “importing” millions of people who are “not used to democratic rules of behavior.” When challenged by the host about his own background, he bristled. “The Polish Jews who came to Sweden and Denmark didn’t take with them their nasty habit of killing their daughters,” nor did they try to “impose their cultural habits” on their new societies, he argued. The rush to welcome refugees, he insists, is because Germans didn’t “use the chance to go to a good shrink” and explore the residual burden from the Second World War.9

  For Broder, it’s not about the numbers. It’s the fact that “they concentrate in certain quarters” that become “no-go areas.” He mentions Nørrebro in Copenhagen which, like Kreuzberg in Berlin, is both an area with lots of immigrants and the epicentre of bohemian hipsterism. Broder insisted he’s not a culture warrior. “I don’t mind having a mosque in the middle of Kurfürstendamm,” he conceded, “provided that they don’t store weapons in the basement.”10

  In Broder’s telling, the German left has swung from being latent anti-Semites to blindly repentant do-gooders. But he insists Germany has no moral obligation whatsoever to take in refugees and is instead engaging in cultural imperialism by seeking to show the rest of Europe its moral superiority. Merkel’s only obligation, he believes, is to her own citizens, and she never asked them.

  Despite many Germans’ enthusiastic welcoming of refugees in late 2015, all was not well in their country. Large anti-Islam marches took place in major German cities, and hostels housing newly arrived refugees were attacked and burned. On October 17, a far-r
ight activist stabbed the politician Henriette Reker in the neck while she was campaigning to become mayor of Cologne. She survived the attack and won the election by a wide margin. Merkel and other leading German officials condemned the attacker as a coward and lamented the radicalization of the refugee debate, but there is a growing section of the population that feels it is not being heard by political elites. Some of these angry citizens are turning to violence, and they are not necessarily unhinged madmen; in some cases, their stated motives are explicitly political and they are being egged on by far-right ideas. Ms. Reker served for years as Cologne’s director of refugee services and oversaw housing for asylum-seekers. According to Der Spiegel, when the attacker was asked his motives, he told local police that “foreigners are taking our jobs” and warned that Sharia law was on its way to Germany.11

  Three months later, Cologne was rocked by an even bigger scandal that seemed to confirm Broder’s dark warning. On December 31, 2015, hundreds of women attending New Year’s Eve celebrations were groped, attacked, and robbed. Several were raped. Most of the perpetrators were described as North African in appearance; some turned out to be asylum-seekers. The press was slow to cover the story, and Mayor Reker and the police were criticized for not taking the investigation of allegations from over one thousand women seriously, fueling the already strong narrative that Merkel’s policy had brought chaos to Germany. Riss, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who had survived the January attack, added fuel to the fire by depicting Alan Kurdi, the dead Syrian boy found on a Turkish beach, and suggesting, if he’d lived, he’d have grown up to be an ass-groper in Cologne.12

  Angela Merkel approaches politics with the patience and experimentation of the research scientist that she is (she has a PhD in quantum chemistry). As a former US ambassador to Germany noted, “If you cross her, you end up dead.… There’s a whole list of alpha males who thought they would get her out of the way, and they’re all now in other walks of life.” That list includes her political mentor, the late Helmut Kohl, who tutored Merkel as she entered politics as a complete outsider, raised in Communist East Germany with no conception of how democratic political institutions worked. When Kohl became mired in scandal in 1999, Merkel had risen in the ranks to the position of party general secretary and she pounced, sending an op-ed to the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calling for new, untainted leadership in the party. That was when most Germans first heard the name Angela Merkel.

  The old Christian Democratic Union (CDU) establishment didn’t know what hit them when Merkel came along.13 As Merkel’s biographer put it, “She’s a learned democrat—not a born democrat.” She couldn’t comprehend why wealthy West German kids would have rebelled by joining the Baader-Meinhof Group; to her, they seemed like “spoiled children.” But being from the East had its advantages. She was patient and disciplined, and she knew when to hold her tongue.14

  Yet the refugee crisis and the attacks that have followed it have presented her with an acutely sensitive situation that is difficult to manage. When the backlash to Merkel’s stance on refugees did arrive, it came not from the opposition or even other parties in her coalition but from within, from the head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s counterpart in the state of Bavaria, the region where most of the refugees were arriving.

  The CDU and CSU are known as Schwesterpartei—sister parties. When Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CSU, denounced Merkel’s border policy, it seemed a grave threat to her authority. But the CSU does not exist as a party outside the state of Bavaria; Seehofer would never challenge Merkel on a national level, nor would he succeed if he tried. What was really driving him was political posturing to ensure that no challenge from the right threatens the CSU’s majority hold on power in Bavaria, and that meant a hard-line stance from Seehofer to protect his right flank. His fear was that his voters might ultimately desert to the upstart far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD—an existential threat to the CSU.

  Seehofer’s fear has deep historical roots. The godfather of the CSU was Franz Josef Strauss, who famously declared that the party could never allow another conservative party in the democratic sphere to exist—that there could never be an opponent to its right. As the journalist Robin Alexander explains, the party’s philosophy is “We do everything. We are left radical. We are right radical. We are liberals. We include everything. We speak for the worker. We speak for the boss. We speak for the town. Everything has to be inside our spectrum.” It was dogma.15 Even the liberals who didn’t like it accepted it as their duty to allow space for a right-wing element within its big tent—with one exception.

  There was one politician who challenged that dogma two decades ago: Peter Altmaier, the rotund, multilingual son of a coal miner, who is today regarded as the second-most powerful person in Berlin. An intellectually intimidating politician—he claims to have a library of six hundred books on Bismarck—he is now Merkel’s chief of staff.16 Back in the 1990s, Altmaier worried that the radical right, even if it were a fringe, would influence the party’s agenda and endanger its role as a force of the centre.17 He is now a driving force in responding to the refugee crisis.

  Until Seehofer publicly challenged Merkel’s border policy, the two politicians offered two distinct strands of the same national party. Speaking with two faces proved highly effective at the polls.18 Merkel is generally seen as quite liberal, and many Germans who wouldn’t have normally voted for her but cannot opt for the CSU beyond Bavaria could tell themselves that she was part of the same party and vote CDU. Likewise, Bavarian voters who leaned left would refrain from supporting the Greens or Social Democrats in local elections because even though the local CSU might be adopting a hard line in the campaign, in parliament they would align with Merkel so everything would be fine. As a result, Merkel received the votes of those with far more conservative views and Seehofer got those of reluctant liberals in local elections. The CDU-CSU alliance won nationally and in Bavaria; Seehofer kept control of his state, and Merkel stayed at the country’s helm. It was a mutually beneficial pact.

  Merkel’s stance on the refugee crisis can be seen through the lens of Germany’s postwar political thinking. There is an almost religious conviction that there cannot be another Sonderweg, or special path, for Germany. The most widely read history book among German politicians is The Long Road West by Heinrich August Winkler. German history since the war has been largely focused on becoming part of the West. Merkel has insisted on a European solution and sees German generosity as a means to getting there, effectively giving other EU countries time to prepare for accepting refugees until they can be distributed across Europe.

  But this clashes fundamentally with the allergy to a Sonderweg, argues Alexander. “This is very hard to swallow for older Germans because they learned to never do something alone.”19

  Merkel’s border policy would have never been possible had she been on her own politically. The Social Democrats, Merkel’s biggest challengers in the September 2017 election, served in her cabinet, while other key opponents were within her own party or coalition. Dissident CDU MPs won’t attack their own party in advance of an election, and Seehofer’s CSU is no threat to her on a national level. Moreover, the Greens and many others on the left have staunchly backed her on the refugee question. But permanent support across the political spectrum is not guaranteed, especially when voters are shocked by violent events.

  In 2016, a week before Christmas, Ariel Zurawski, the owner of a Polish haulage company, began to observe strange data signals from one of his eighteen-wheelers parked near Berlin. The engine was starting and stopping as if someone didn’t know how to operate the ignition. The owner tried to call his cousin, the driver, who was scheduled to deliver a load of steel to a Berlin warehouse the next day. There was no reply.

  Four hours later, the lorry, emblazoned with Zurawski’s name above the cab, plowed into a crowded Christmas market in the centre of Berlin, killing twelve and injuring dozens more. Zurawski’s
cousin was found dead with a bullet to the head in the passenger seat. Frauke Petry, then the leader of the far-right AfD, immediately sought to capitalize on the carnage, calling the victims “Merkel’s dead.”20

  Across Europe, terrorist attacks have been exploited by the far right as opportunities to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment; too often, journalists and intellectuals have played along. On March 22, 2016, terrorists detonated huge bombs at Brussels Airport and on the city’s underground during the rush hour, killing thirty-five people and injuring over three hundred. The Charlie Hebdo editorial published a week after the Brussels attacks was strikingly similar to the anti-Semitism peddled in the late nineteenth century during the Dreyfus Affair. These days, anti-Semitism isn’t kosher, but there is no shame in targeting a new scapegoat.

  The Charlie Hebdo editorial painted innocent Muslims as unwitting conspirators in a jihadist struggle to take over Europe, the tip of the Islamist iceberg. Its author was the cartoonist Riss who, six months earlier, had depicted a dead three-year-old refugee as a potential sex criminal.

  He begins his article with the spectre of Tariq Ramadan—a familiar villain—and his calls for a European form of Islam and for Western democracies to adapt and allow religion a place in public life. Ramadan would never shoot up a newspaper office or bomb an airport, Riss writes, others will do that instead of him. His task is to dissuade others from criticizing Islam through intellectual intimidation. He’ll instill a fear in young political science students who one day will become elected officials or journalists from saying anything negative about Islam for fear that they’ll be accused of Islamophobia. “That is Tariq Ramadan’s role.”21